Weird wireless network problem

Factual Questions
1

I have a Hawk wireless router (its a pretty cheap device), so that may be the answer right there…

Anyway, when I have the router setup to not use any wireless security (ie, no encryption) my notebook can connect to it just fine.

Now, this isn’t very secure so I set my router to use 128-bit WEP. I had to make up my own key. After making this change, for some reason, every few minutes or so, the little taskbar icon keeps popping up indicating that a “Wireless network has been detected” and my current connection stops working. It seems as though my connection keeps momentarily dropping, and then it reconnects.

Signal strength is maximum; this isn’t the reason though as everything works fine without the 128bit WEP.

Any ideas what might be going on? Perhaps it is just my piece o’ crap router.

2

I also had a smooth running wireless network until I turned on WEP. Now I have problems staying connected. or not.

The icon that’s in systray says I am connected, great signal, 11MBPS speed – but nothing can acutally connect to the Internet. Sometimes it’ll fix if I right click on the network and select “repair” but that doesn’t always work. (and may, for that matter be random. it seems to work and not work pretty much on its own schedule).